1. Technical Field
This application relates to management of business data and, in particular, to management of financial data and data related to the financial data.
2. Related Art
Financial data of a business may be collected for various purposes. In public companies, financial data is collected and reported to the public to satisfy legal reporting requirements. Financial data may also be collected for management decision making. Often there is overlap between the financial data collected for legal reporting and the financial data collected for management decision making. However, the kinds of data collected for the two purposes may be different. The level of detail required for legal reporting of a one kind of financial data may be less than the level of detail desired for management decision making.
Existing financial systems are focused on collecting financial data for legal reporting purposes. Disparate types of businesses collect similar kinds of financial data for legal reporting purposes. Much of the financial data collected that is required for legal reporting is stored by existing financial systems in a general ledger database. The general ledger database includes transactional data, such as data relating to each sale made by a business. Often systems that manage business transactions are integrated with the general ledger database. Such systems may automatically populate the general ledger database on the completion of each transaction.
In contrast, disparate types of businesses often collect different kinds of financial data for management purposes. For example, a business involved in the manufacturing industry may want to collect financial information that is not even relevant to a business involved in the services industry. Even businesses of the same type may collect different kinds of financial data for management purposes. The reason may be that the kind of financial data considered important to one business manager may not be considered important to another business manager.
Also in contrast to legal reporting, financial data collected strictly for management decision making purposes often is related to business activities that are not tracked by any automated system. The financial data may not be transactional in nature and, consequently, not stored in the general ledger database. As a result, the financial data may be manually collected and entered into spreadsheets at various levels of a business to the extent that the financial data is even collected. The financial data may be summarized in a spreadsheet as the financial data is rolled up at the various levels of the business. The process of summarizing the data may result in losing an ability to drill down to a lower level of detail as desired in some financial analyses. Supplemental data related to the financial data may also not be available for further analysis.
Furthermore, different kinds of financial data not stored in the general ledger database may require different workflows. For example, one category of financial data may need to be entered during one time period, and another category of financial data may need to be entered during another time period. As another example, one category of financial data may need to be signed off on by a deadline different from another category of financial data. A person who has sign-off authority may be different for different business units and may be unknown to one analyzing data collected from multiple business units.